Garry Littman is the owner and director of The Language House in Geneva which organises English language training for professional people, companies and students. He was a radio and newspaper journalist in his native Australia and ran a restaurant in Kathmandu in his younger days. He is an English language trainer and an aficionado of pétanque.

Hansel and Gretel (have guns)

ONCE upon a time there were fairy tales, and unicorns were magical horses with horns, not be confused with start-up companies valued at more than a billion dollars.

These tales were far from innocent; driven by a dark undercurrent of unspeakable cruelty. A Donald Trump and an economic slump were not much more than a bad hair day for long-suffering Snow White and poor Hansel and Gretel, battling family abuse, slave labour, infanticide, cannibalism and far too much sugar; all in just a couple of pages.

Now, the progressive American organisation known as the National Rifle Association (NRA) has come to the rescue of parents and children with the medicine they know best. Guns and bullets.

They’ve kindly given Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel the keys to the gun cabinet (and we can only hope, a few gun safety lessons) and told the kids to get out there and show the big bad wolf and the witch who really is the boss with a semi-automatic.

It’s a double-barrel win/win. In the NRA world, more guns is always the right and profitable answer, and of course, the villains get pumped full of lead and the kids get to sleep soundly. It’s great marketing too, because each time there is a massacre, gun sales go through the roof. As every marketing executive knows: Hook them young and you’ve got them for life.

Well maybe not life… In March 2016 there were 350 shooting incidents in the US involving children under the age of 12, which clearly indicates the Grimm threat that wolves and witches pose to kiddies today. Guns don’t kill, cross-dressing wolves do.

In the month of December 2015 more guns were sold in the USA than any month in the last 20 years. That’s the reality. Gun control is the fairy tale. Gun control is for those that still believe in unicorns.

FOR those readers whose best friend was once upon a time a unicorn there was some rainbow-filled news this week. Here’s an artist’s impression of the Siberian unicorn (Elasmotherium sibiricum) believed to have roamed the earth only 29,000 years ago.

According to scientists from American Journal of Applied Science, this shaggy beast (imagine a cross between a yak and a mammoth) measured two metres tall and may have lived alongside humans. Obviously it was a time before guns.